Friday, June 6, 2008

Yearly Planning for Next Year

I understand that not everyone loves to plan and organize as much as I do, so you will have to bear with me in my extreme "geeky-ness!" I get great joy out of planning and I find our school runs so much more smoothly when I have a plan!

The first thing that I did was to look at next year's calendar and mark out the weeks we would be gone and figure out how I wanted to break up the 36 weeks. I chose 36 weeks because TOG has 36 lessons and even though we technically school year-round, I do try to have a difference between the normal year and our summer work.

The next thing that I have done is to break all my curriculum up into 36 weeks. This I have listed on the chart below. This is the first year that I have done this with all the subjects, and so I know that there will be weeks that we don't get through everything, but I really like to keep moving on our TOG studies so that we can get through the whole curriculum by the time we go on vacation in June. It has worked this year, and knowing that I can't stop has been a great motivator to keep me pushing forward. I have been pleased with how much we did get done. We'll see how it goes with everything pre-scheduled! Whatever we can't finish will be finished in our summer weeks.

The final thing that I am working on is making up my notebooks. Last year I had wonderful sucess with my history notebooks that I am going to make monthly notebooks with the kids daily work. I have been tearing up workbooks and copying pages that we will need, but I think it will be so nice to have everything in one place next year.

The final step is to make my checklist. I don't like working from a strict schedule (meaning from 9-9:30 we do math, etc.) I much prefer having a list where I can make sure we completed everything I wanted to get done that week. I use this page (which I "stole" and modified from Jessica. On this page I write down everything I need to remember to accomplish.

I love your year spread sheet. I"ve been trying to duplicate it in a way and its driving me crazy. So I've decided to go straight to the source and ask..where did you get it and can you print it on one page? I love reading your blog!